Japanese Manhole covers T-shirts from 47Regions
Japan is a place of so many different and wonderful things to do and see. A lot of times when we are planning our trips to Japan we decide not always to have our whole day Read more

Kizuna Japanese subscription box
This is a promotional post.
We were offered the opportunity to try a new subscription box from Kizuna Box from Japan. Of course we jumped at the chance. We were given the option of two different boxes, Read more

Sakura Matsuri Stockholm – Cherry Blossom Festival
On April 22nd was the annual cherry blossom hanami festival in Stockholm (“Körsbärsblommans Dag”), Sweden. It's an event organized by the Japanese Association, and we were very happy to see that they - once Read more

Top Japanese places to visit in London
In this post we have collected our top Japanese places to visit in London. The city has so many places that are connected to Japan in one way or another. In our top Read more

Best art, crafts and stationery shops in Tokyo
As a person who love all things art and crafts I've hunted down the best shops that I could find during my travels in Tokyo. Here's a guide to my personal favourites. Read more

Grace Buchele Mineta

About the author

As we previously wrote in our last book review Grace is Texan that moved to Tokyo to be with her husband Ryosuke. Grace is a self publishing comic book author, freelance writer and YouTuber. If you want to know more about Grace, you can either read our previous post or check her out on YouTube or her blog.

Confessions of a Texan in Tokyo

This is Grace’s third book. We were really looking forward to reading it, as we both are big fans of Grace and Ryosuke, and we enjoyed her two previous books and had high hopes for the third. Thanks to Grace we were able to get our hands on the pre-release version of the book before it was available on Amazon. We both got down to reading it straight away and within a day we had both read it, we couldn’t put it down.

The book follows Grace and her day to day adventures in Japan, with her husband and friends, and her imaginary rabbit Marvin. The book is a mixture of comic strips and tip bits of information on all things Japanese. One of the things we really like about the comic strips is that we can actually hear Grace saying the words, which makes it even more funny. The book also shows the cultural differences between a Japanese person and a non Japanese person. The book is both fun and informational, with lots of interesting facts about Japan, on every few pages. One of the fun facts that we didn’t know about before, was that there are shop dedicated to gift wrapping. We’ve always been impressed by our friends that have given us nicely wrapped gifts and now we know next time we are in Japan we can go to a shop and get ours wrapped just as good.

Another nice touch in this book was that Ryosuke had two pages with comics that he had drawn himself, which we hope to see more of in the future.

As with the previous books, we highly recommend this new one. Either buy as a hard copy, or as we did, download and read on a tablet. If you buy the book from Grace on Etsy you can get the book signed.

About the author

Grace Buchele Mineta is an author, blogger, freelance writer and YouTuber from Texas, who now resides in Tokyo with her Japanese husband.

We first came across Grace (Texan in Tokyo), the author of “My Japanese Husband STILL Thinks I’m Crazy”,and her husband Ryosuke through our love for all things Japanese. In this particular case our first encounter with Texan in Tokyo was their YouTube channel. We stumbled upon the channel after hearing other J-vloggers (Japanese videologgers on YouTube) talking about them. After watching a couple of their videos we added them to our subscription list.

The YouTube videos are a part of her blog, Texan in Tokyo, where she posts a mixture of personal essays, videos and comics, all from personal experience, or as she puts it on her own blog, “a window into the life of my husband (Ryosuke) and my entertaining and wonderful life in Tokyo”.

My Japanese Husband STILL Thinks I’m Crazy

This is the second book from the self published author. The book is an autobiographical collection of comic strip styled shorts about her and her husband’s life on a day to day basis and informative text snippets about Japanese culture and life.

As we were already fans of Grace and Ryosuke, it was great to read the comic styled book, with them both in. It was like watching some of the videos we had already seen on YouTube, but done into comic strip form. But you don’t have to have even heard of them before to fall in love with the book itself. It’s a charming, quirky and sweet look into their relationship. After reading the first couple of pages it is easy to get hooked. You can’t wait to see what Ryosuke gets up to on the next page, because he always has something crazy that he is up to.

I found the book was an easy read, since it’s comprised of many short and comical comics, which is great for a person like me who hate to read page after page of text. You don’t have to be a Japanese fanatic to enjoy this book, but of course it does help. I am now looking forward to reading the first book, My Japanese Husband Thinks I’m Crazy, which is available on Amazon, along with her new book.

Get the books on Amazon, and check out her website to continue following Grace and Ryosuke.

For the next couple of days you can download both books for free. Check the books on their Amazon page below for more info.

11 months agoby whysojapanHie Shrine, a Shinto shrine in Tokyo. It is somewhere around 600 years old, but has been rebuilt a couple of times due to a great fire in 1657 and the bombing of Tokyo during WW2. It is one of the national treasures of Japan, and a place in Tokyo where you can see pretty red torii in a long row. #NationalTreasure #国宝 #kokuh ō #HieShrine #日枝神社 #HieJinja#Shintoshrine#torii

1 year agoby whysojapanThe winners for the official Tokyo 2020 Games mascots have been chosen. “The Olympic Mascot and Paralympic Mascot have opposite personalities. However, they respect each other and they are very good friends. They both have a great spirit of hospitality. They always try their best to cheer and encourage everyone.” #tokyo2020#olympics#olympics2020#mascots#whysojapan#olympics#paralympics